Word: poborchiy
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Dates: during 2009-2009
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...they wanted it turned into a memorial. Regional governor Dmitry Dmitriyenko pledged his support and the city has set aside a small plot overlooking the harbor and next to another memorial, a lighthouse dedicated to sailors who died in peacetime. (This memorial also mentions the Kursk sailors, but Vitaly Poborchiy, a local businessman and ranking member of the regional branch of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party, says townsfolk want a monument dedicated solely to the Kursk...
...There is a contradiction here: The people spearheading the memorial are Kremlin loyalists who do whatever Moscow tells them to do, while the memorial they are building appears to conflict with Kremlin interests. Poborchiy nicely captures this incongruity. At 51, he admires Putin, who may no longer officially run the Kremlin but is assumed to orchestrate the every move of his successor, Dmitry Medvedev. Indeed, Poborchiy seems self-consciously Putinesque, sporting a tracksuit with the Russian tricolor and leading a men's team of ice swimmers who converge on a lake for morning races every winter, when Murmansk descends...
...Poborchiy is also convinced that Putin is lying. "I want the truth known. I don't believe the official version of events," he says, adding that he believes the thesis advanced by a 2004 French documentary that contended a U.S. submarine torpedoed the Kursk. The new memorial, he says, will ensure that the men who died will never be forgotten...
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